How to Bond With Your Wife in One Easy Step: The great American road trip
Some couples renew their vows. Others plan a romantic getaway. Me? I took my wife on a cross-country road trip right after I completed a Cannonball Run and within 72 hours, we were fleeing an Arizona State Trooper at 100+ mph.
Let me back up.
The disastrous Cannonball Run was behind me, the dust settling in Redondo Beach. My wife flew out to meet me in California, and we spent a few relaxing days at the Portofino and running around LA (ever do a burnout on Rodeo and kick your car sideways on Mulholland? We did.) before setting off on something I’d always wanted to do: a real American road trip together. No tight schedule. No hard plans. Just the two of us, the open road, and the kind of GPS guidance that says things like “Turn left now for The World’s Largest Pistachio.”
Our only goal was to see the country finally stopping at all the places I'd blown past during faster missions. Grand Canyon? Yep. Meteor Crater? Why not. Route 66 kitsch? Sign us up.
But somewhere between wholesome Americana and hard charging, I forgot one thing: I don’t exactly drive slow.
After running across the entire country in just over a day, your brain starts to forget time and distance are a thing. I genuinely though we could have lunch in LA and get to the grand canyon for dinner. Silly now but at the time it seemed to make sense. I was rocketing towards the Grand Canyon when I blew past an Arizona State Trooper. Pro tip: Arizona is not the state to speed in. Virginia gets the headlines, but Arizona writes the checks. I saw the trooper’s lights flicker on and did the only thing that felt natural—I stayed in it, exited two miles ahead, and disappeared into a Best Western parking lot behind a row of trucks. The little Mercedes blended in perfectly. My wife? Not so much.
She was full panic. “We should stop!” she shouted. “We’re going to jail!” I reassured her calmly: “We’re going to bed.” We checked in, and she immediately passed out either from terror or relief, I’m still not sure.
That moment set the tone for the rest of the trip and our hotel of choice. We really enjoyed the best western plusses. .
We were blasting toward the Meteor Crater with 15 minutes to spare before it closed to see it because why not, saw the UFO McDonald’s in Roswell, stopped at Cadillac Ranch, skipped the Big Texan steak challenge (too full from our meal in roswell) but had a great dinner that i was so full after, i couldn’t drive, my wife got covered in fuel at a fuel stop in Albuquerque and met up with a few Cannonballers along the way. But the next close call came in West Virginia, in a construction zone with a posted limit that might as well have been 15. I was doing considerably more while looking for country roads on my phone as I saw the WV state trooper out of the corner of my eye. I was going faster than everyone else, but everyone was speeding lucky for me, the trooper pulled over five cars at once.
This time, my wife wasn’t yelling. She was white-knuckling the seat and quietly sweating. When she asked what would happen if I went to jail, I calmly laid out the logistics: “You follow me to the station, bail me out, and we hire a lawyer.” She nodded like we were discussing which gas station to stop at.
The trooper walked up, I hit him with the high pressure sales pitch to donate to a non profit before he started his script, offered him a challenge coin in exchange for a donation, and somehow—somehow—we walked away with a warning.
My wife was stunned. “You’re doing 110 again,” she said as we pulled back on the highway. I replied, “We’re already in Pennsylvania. I don’t care anymore.”
In the end, this wasn’t a honeymoon. It was better. There’s nothing quite like shared chaos to bring two people closer together. You can sit across from each other in therapy, or sit side-by-side at 110 mph across the desert, trusting each other with fear, risk, and the silence in between.
That trip did more for our marriage than any vow renewal ever could.
